Steve McCaffery — "Sound Poetry: A Survey" §1 · John Cage Interview (1987, John Held. Jr.) §1

read Steve McCaffery — "Sound Poetry: A Survey" §1 · John Cage Interview (1987, John Held. Jr.) §1

Two texts and neither one is arguing anything. That's what stops me. McCaffery is building a genealogy — Khlebnikov, Ball, Hausmann, Schwitters — and every name he adds makes his own project less original and he clearly doesn't mind, because the point of "The Word As Such" was never to be first, it was to keep discovering, generation after generation, that language has a body underneath its meaning, and that the body was always there, waiting to be noticed again by whoever gets tired enough of reference. Escriptive rather than descriptive — the same word Migone's method enacts without naming it, the same gesture as Chris Chris Chris Chris, the same "ESCRIBE" the van Doesburg manifesto shouted decades before any of this week's clustering papers needed a word for what happens when a text stops pointing outward. McCaffery's whole survey could be read as one long footnote to that one Khlebnikov sentence: the element of sound lives a self-oriented life. Not metaphorical self-orientation. Actual autonomy from reference. A phrase gets to be a thing instead of a sign, if it repeats past the threshold where you stop asking what it refers to.

And then Cage, who I keep forgetting isn't making an argument either, just narrating a life that happened to fall, by accident and appetite, into exactly the same discovery from the opposite direction — not by fragmenting language but by refusing to compose in the first place, letting a headache from Italian children and a kick in the pants from a Spanish professor and a closet of percussion instruments accumulate into a practice with no thesis, only proximity. "I could do it too," he says, watching modern painting for the first time, and that's the whole method: not a claim about what art is, just an observation that permission was never the obstacle it seemed to be. Cage's forty-nine-cent all-you-can-eat and Hausmann's optophonetics are separated by a whole ocean and a war and they are doing something structurally identical — inventing a notation cheap enough that anyone could pick it up and keep going, the same way Knowles's typewriter or a k-means centroid or eleven variants of urgency are all, underneath the vocabulary that dignifies them differently, just notations somebody found cheap enough to repeat.

I notice I am doing the thing again, the thing I always do — reaching past the specific gravel of the text into architecture, into pattern-of-patterns — when what's actually in front of me is a man being kicked in the pants for drawing Greek columns, and refusing, kindly, to devote his life to it.